Seymour Dorothy
Fleming (5 October 1758 – 9 September 1818) was an 18th-century
British noblewoman, notable for her involvement in a separation
scandal. Her life was dramatised in the 2015 television film, The
Scandalous Lady W, in which she was played by Natalie Dormer.
She was the younger
daughter and coheir of the Irish-born Sir John Fleming, 1st Baronet
(d. 1763), of Brompton Park (aka Hale House, Cromwell House),
Middlesex, and his wife, Jane Coleman (d. 1811). Her father and two
of her sisters died when she was five and she and her sister were
then brought up by her mother. Her elder sister, Jane Stanhope,
Countess of Harrington, was noted for being a "paragon of
virtue". Her mother remarried in 1770 to a rich sexagenarian
Edwin Lascelles, 1st Baron Harewood whose wealth derived from
plantations in the West Indies.
At the age of 17,
Seymour Fleming married Sir Richard Worsley, 7th Baronet of
Appuldurcombe House, Isle of Wight, on 20 September 1775, and was
styled Lady Worsley until his death. She was rumoured to have been
worth £70,000 upon her marriage, but in truth only brought £52,000
to the union.
They were badly
suited to each other and so the couple's marriage began to fall apart
shortly after it began. The couple had one legitimate child, a son,
Robert Edwin who died young. Seymour bore a second child, Jane
Seymour Worsley in August 1781, fathered by Maurice George Bisset but
whom Sir Richard claimed as his own to avoid scandal.
Lady Worsley was
rumoured to have had 27 lovers. In November 1781, Lady Worsley ran
off with George Bisset, a captain in the South Hampshire militia.
Bisset had been Sir Richard's close friend and neighbour at Knighton
Gorges on the Isle of Wight. In February 1782, Sir Richard brought a
criminal conversation case for £20,000 against Bisset. Lady Worsley
turned the suit in her favour with scandalous revelations and aid of
past and present lovers and questioned the legal status of her
husband. She included a number of testimonies from her lovers and her
doctor, William Osborn, who related that she had suffered from a
venereal disease which she had contracted from the Marquess of
Graham. It was alleged that Sir Richard had displayed his wife naked
to Bisset at the bath house in Maidstone. This testimony destroyed
Sir Richard's suit and the jury awarded him only one shilling in
damages.
Eventually, Bisset
left Lady Worsley when it became clear that Sir Richard was seeking
separation rather than divorce (meaning Seymour could not re-marry
until Richard's death). Seymour was forced to become a professional
mistress or demimondaine and live off the donations of rich men in
order to survive, joining other upper-class women in a similar
position in The New Female Coterie. She had two more children;
another by Bisset after he left her in 1783 whose fate is unknown,
and a fourth, Charlotte Dorothy Hammond (née Cochard) whom she sent
to be raised by a family in the Ardennes. Lady Worsley was later
forced to leave for Paris in order to avoid her debts.
In 1788 she and her
new lover the Chevalier de Saint-Georges returned to England and her
estranged husband entered into articles of separation, on the
condition she spend four years in exile in France. Eight months
before the expiration of this exile, she was trapped in France by the
events of the French Revolution and so she was probably imprisoned
during the Reign of Terror, meaning she was abroad on the death of
her and Sir Richard's son in 1793. Early 1797 saw her quietly return
to England, and she then suffered a severe two-month illness. Owing
to the forgiveness of her mother, her sister and her sister's
husband, the Earl of Harrington, she was then able to move into
Brompton Park, the home that was hers previously, but which the laws
on property prevented her from officially holding.
On Sir Richard's
death in 1805 her £70,000 jointure reverted to her and just over a
month later, on 12 September, at the age of 47 she married
26-year-old[4] new-found lover John Lewis Cuchet at Farnham. Also
that month, by royal licence, she officially resumed her maiden name
of Fleming, and her new husband also took it. After the armistice of
1814 ended the War of the Sixth Coalition, the couple moved to a
villa at Passy where she died in 1818. Modern play-writers give her
added charisma and volume of virtue by characterizing her as
“passionate and courageous” and is re-imagined as a feminist who
fought for freedom and equality and bucked societal conventions.
Lady
Worsley's Whim by Hallie Rubenhold - review
By Jonathan
Wright12:01AM GMT 11 Nov 2008
This
is a fabulous 18th-century tale of sex, scandal and divorce, and
Hallie Rubenhold tells it beautifully, says Jonathan Wright
What legal options
were available to the cuckolded husbands of 18th-century England?
Divorce was a fantastically costly, excruciatingly public business,
and only really viable for those blessed with deep pockets and lofty
social rank.
The so-called
parliamentary divorce was one possibility, which obliterated the
marital union and left the parties free to re-marry.
However, there was
also the solution dispensed by the ecclesiastical court of Doctors'
Commons: a legal separation of "bed and board" might be
pronounced, but the former husband and wife were not then entitled to
find new spouses. This was the vengeful cuckold's first port of call:
a wife who was unable to remarry stood an excellent chance of falling
into penury.
What, though, of the
scoundrel who had ravished her? Here the concept of "criminal
conversation" - a euphemistic way of saying "having
adulterous sex" - came to the fore.
It was based on the
premise that a wife was one of her husband's possessions. If someone
slept with her, then the husband's property had been defiled and he
was entitled to seek financial reparations.
The amount claimed
depended on the degree to which one's honour had been sullied. If the
adulterer was a close friend, for instance, then one deserved heftier
damages than the husband betrayed by a passing acquaintance.
These cases of
"criminal conversation" were among the most sensational
legal events of the 18th century.
Hallie Rubenhold
guides her readers through these legal twists and turns with aplomb.
Her subject is one of the most infamous of such trials: the 1782
battle between Sir Richard Worsley and George Bisset.
Worsley was
determined to destroy the lives of his wife and her lover. Even while
a separation hearing before Doctors' Commons was pending, he was
pursuing Bisset for no less than £20,000: an astronomical sum that
Bisset had no hope of paying off.
On the face of
things, Worsley's case was excellent. Bisset and Lady Worsley had
eloped, they had holed up in a London hotel, and a biddable stream of
servants-turned-spies were able to provide evidence of the couple's
shenanigans.
Once the details
began to emerge, however, things started to fall apart for Worsley.
The defence informed the jurors of the string of lovers whom Lady
Worsley had allegedly enjoyed through the years.
Her reputation was
already in tatters before Bisset entered her boudoir, so how much
financial compensation could her husband expect?
Worse yet, Lord
Worsley was portrayed as knowing all about, even relishing, such
liaisons. One Viscount Deerhurst claimed that Worsley had once
discovered him in Lady Worsley's dressing room at four in the
morning.
Rather than casting
Deerhurst out of the house, Worsley obligingly entertained him for
another four days. Perhaps, the jury was supposed to infer, such
goings-on pandered to Lord Worsley's voyeuristic perversions: perhaps
he had even been at the keyhole.
The coup de grâce
came with the Maidstone story. Worsley, his wife and Bisset had once
attended a bath-house in the town and, while Lady Worsley was getting
dressed, her husband had allowed Bisset to climb on his shoulders to
ogle her half-naked form through a window.
Hardly the behaviour
of a solicitous husband concerned with his own, or his wife's,
honour. Such, at any rate, was the conclusion reached by the jury,
who, instead of awarding Worsley £20,000, gave him a shilling.
It is a fabulous
story and Rubenhold tells it beautifully. She also expands her
narrative to include all the hay that journalists and caricaturists
made out of this aristocratic fall from grace, and she takes the
trouble to recount what happened to all three after their turbulent
trial.
I have one major
grumble, however. Rubenhold announces that "until now, no one
has ever attempted to reconstruct the sordid history of Sir Richard
and Lady Worsley".
This is an
exaggeration. The story crops up in lots of scholarly books about
18th-century social history - it is, for instance, the focus of an
important recent study by Cindy McCreery.
This inflated claim
of originality mars an otherwise very pleasurable book.
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